[Fixed in v7.0] JRiver MC31 not playing when 29 is also installed

[Manni]

Others (like Paul) are a joy to work with.

Thanks. I try. think it helps that I usually assume I made a mistake. I'm a self-taught programmer, which means I usually do things wrong. Over time as I improve, I go back and look at my old code and shake my head in despair. At least I am improving, so there's always hope for the future.

I'm glad you've made progress in getting your perfect setup working.

I used to be a professional developer (a long, long time ago) and I also assumed I could have made a mistake. I think it's about the attitude. Or maybe they have to deal with a lot of newbies and they rely on their handful of beta testers as a first line of defence.

Jamie, I had missed that your issue was specifically with JRVR, so selected it (I normally use madVR) and I don't have the issue either, DVDs just play fine here.

Any reason why you don't want to use JRVR? IMHO, JRVR a far better option if you don't use madVR, especially for HDR content. It was far behind until MC31, but its tonemapping is almost as good as madVR now, and it uses much less resources for an almost similar result. If you don't have a good reason not to use it, make your life simpler and select RO JRVR.

I don't think that Hendrik wants to spend much time on anything else, because JRVR is likely to replace any other option in the near future. As soon as it supports everything that madVR offers (full black bar detection, automatic profiles switching with rules and manual with hotkeys) they might even stop supporting madVR alltogether, as the latest official version dates back from six years ago and it's full of problems.

So I would focus on issues with JRVR, that's a better investment of your own time too, again unless you have a good reason to not use it.

[Jamie]

Hi Manni,

I am using red October jrvr for blurays and the I like how good the picture looks so I'll stick with ro jrvr for blurays. With ro jrvr I always get a a black screen and after a few seconds an echoing effect with dvds. I think jrvr is crashing in this particular instance. When I changed the settings to jrvr standard, dvds play fine but the quality of the bluray image to me is degraded. As I stated in a previous message I think there is a problem with my substandard equipment for DVD playback with ro jrvr. Just surprising that higher quality blurays work and not dvds. I use ripped folders through foxy. My blurays are all iso rips without protection. Mpc is good enough for dvds so I will not report my DVD issue. I do not have a 4k uhd setup yet so I am unable to try that right now.

Manni what GPU do you have? When i upgrade I want to steer away from the more power hungry modern cards. I do not game but I do use Adobe premier for video editing, photoshop, and of course movie playback. I am also always ripping cds and things for my collection.

Paul your input on a good GPU is welcomed too.

[Jamie]

When I speak of the more power hungry modern cards I am talking about the Nvidia 4000 series. I am at the moment thinking of a higher end 3000 series. I haven't ruled out and I do have more experience with amd. I just hear about people constantly complaining about the amd drivers. This pc will be a htpc but also a work pc. One to rule them all sort of thing .l do have space limitations in my htpc case.

[Pauven]

I don't know much of anything about JRiver or RO JRVR or even madVR - I just haven't had the downtime to really dig in.

I've got a 2080 Super, and while for the most part it seems fine, I'm not really pushing it. I did have to turn off some advanced features in Chrome/Edge/Firefox that was causing YouTube, of all things, to stutter horribly - don't remember what they were exactly. I think if I was in the market, I'd be sticking with Nvidia, 3080 or better, mainly because some of the advanced scaling/tone mapping available these days can make use of the horsepower.

But like I said, I don't have one nor do I make use of those features anyway, so what do I know.

Personally, what I want is to have Windows HDR flipped On/Off automatically when playing back a 4K UHD HDR title. But I guess that is on me...

[Jamie]

I have been thinking of getting a 3070 which seems to be the sweet spot for power usage and also have the ability to handle the latest premiere pro features. I am not a gamer as I said earlier neither do I push premiere to it's limits. I have an older version of premiere now but it would be much easier to work on a faster PC than what I have now.

I am looking at a i9 13900k processor but maybe I can do without the on board graphics since I am getting a gpu anyway and powerdvd uhd support won't be compatible with a 13th gen processor and sgx. Jriver seems to be fine with me. The onboard graphics has helped me in the past to resolve potential video issues with my pcs.

My only problem now would be to find a 13th gen compatible micro atx or mini itx motherboard. I have had asus and asrock motherboards in the past and they have been fine. Do you guys have a preferred MB brand? Caveats?

Any other comments

[Manni]

I have been thinking of getting a 3070 which seems to be the sweet spot for power usage and also have the ability to handle the latest premiere pro features. I am not a gamer as I said earlier neither do I push premiere to it's limits. I have an older version of premiere now but it would be much easier to work on a faster PC than what I have now.

I am looking at a i9 13900k processor but maybe I can do without the on board graphics since I am getting a gpu anyway and powerdvd uhd support won't be compatible with a 13th gen processor and sgx. Jriver seems to be fine with me. The onboard graphics has helped me in the past to resolve potential video issues with my pcs.

My only problem now would be to find a 13th gen compatible micro atx or mini itx motherboard. I have had asus and asrock motherboards in the past and they have been fine. Do you guys have a preferred MB brand? Caveats?

Any other comments

It's really hard to make suggestions because YMMV with any variation of a single hardware or software component.

HTPC-wise, I was super happy with my 1080ti, a 7700K and an Asus MB, until I had to upgrade my previous build for similar reasons to yours (I wanted a HTPC powerful enough to do video editing, gaming and video playback duties with madVR).

For me the choice of nVidia was easy because the developer of madVR uses nVidia GPUs and they are in Envy too, so for my needs it made sense. However, nVidia has stupidly decided to stop supporting 3D MVC in their drivers, so if you want 3D playback support, AMD GPUs are the only choice for a fairly recent GPU.

I went for a 3090 which is likely overspecced for your needs. The 3060/6GB VRAM in my laptop (a Dell 17 9720 with 2x2TB nVME SSDs, i think the GPU is an i7 12700K with 64GB of RAM) is plenty for video playback with madVR, decent 4K video editing with Premiere or Camtasia (unless I throw 5K content to it, but up to 4K is fine) and light gaming. So a desktop 3070 should be plenty for your needs if it has enough VRAM (I wouldn't go for less than 8-10, preferably 12GB). I wanted the 3090 in the desktop because I'm a flight simulator fan and that needs a lot of GPU power. I also wanted to not be limited with madVR in any way. As you don't game, you can live with a GPU with less VRAM, but at the time I purchase my components the only other choice was 10GB, and that wasn't enough (even my 1080ti had more!). My 1080ti is now in an E-GPU and supplements my laptop 3060 when compiling complex Premiere projects (it cuts the time in half as Premiere supports multi-GPUs).

So today, my new HTPC build has a 5950X, a Zotac 3090 with 24GB of VRAM and 32GB of RAM. I've always been happy with Asus, and my experience with my curent ASRock 570 creator has been good too (it was the only option with Thunderbolt on AMD). This new build is a beast for video editing and gaming, and theoretically it's great for HTPC use as well, except that I can't get the 3090 to not drop any frames, as was the case for the 1080ti (with a custom resolution using CRU). I also have lots of ATMOS audio drop outs with jRiver (not with any other software) that keep coming and going. I thought I had readicated them after a clean reinstall of all my video stuff, but they keep cropping back. So currenly I can recommend my new build for everything, except as a flawless HTPC. I can't advise re ITX etc because I went for a Silverstone HTPC case that takes full ATX mobos as I wanted full expandability in my desktop.

Some people make a HTPC that's not connected to the internet and only does that. That way, OS, GPU drivers and software are "frozen" to a working state, and you can use that forever. I would probably recommend Windows 8.1 in that case, with a 2080ti or similar, as you might be able to find old drivers that work and support 3D as well (if that matters to you).

That's about all the advice I can give. Whatever you decide to go for, good luck!

Paul, you simply passthrough HDR to your display because I assume you have a bright enough flat panel. Projector owners with 100nits peak brightness need advanced tonemapping systems (or people with not so bright panels, such as older OLEDs), and that's where madVR / JRVR make a huge difference. Sometimes I wish I had an LG G3 77". In fact I might decide to replace my projector with one. It would definitely make my life simpler.

[Pauven]

However, nVidia has stupidly decided to stop supporting 3D MVC in their drivers, so if you want 3D playback support, AMD GPUs are the only choice for a fairly recent GPU.

I had to look it up to know that MVC 3D is not Motion Vector Compensation but rather Multi-view Video Coding, which is a way of reducing file sizes for 3D streams because data is shared by both views. So does that mean you can't watch 3D movies on Nvidia at all anymore? I've got at least one 3D movie that I've been planning to watch, and now I'm curious if it will even work on my 2080.

Paul, you simply passthrough HDR to your display because I assume you have a bright enough flat panel. Projector owners with 100nits peak brightness need advanced tonemapping systems (or people with not so bright panels, such as older OLEDs), and that's where madVR / JRVR make a huge difference. Sometimes I wish I had an LG G3 77". In fact I might decide to replace my projector with one. It would definitely make my life simpler.

I've been watching everything on my projector for the past year and a half. I don't have a lot of HDR material, and while the projector supports the format it doesn't necessarily do it justice. I've got it dialed in well enough that I enjoy pretty much everything I watch, but I haven't had the time to mess around with tone mapping. Ignorance is bliss.

Some people make a HTPC that's not connected to the internet and only does that. That way, OS, GPU drivers and software are "frozen" to a working state, and you can use that forever. I would probably recommend Windows 8.1 in that case, with a 2080ti or similar, as you might be able to find old drivers that work and support 3D as well (if that matters to you).

My mother is quite advanced in age, and was never technically savvy to start with. I've always been the one maintaining her PC's, and I was tired of cleaning up not just virii and malware but all the little plugins she allowed to install in her browser. In search of a solution, a few years ago I built her a fresh PC and installed Faronics Deep Freeze, which is software that essentially restores the computer to the saved image on EVERY boot. You do have to unfreeze the PC to install any updates, but I have her documents on a separate non-frozen partition, and the solution has worked perfectly for years. No matter what happens (and yes, stuff has happened), a reboot has always saved the day.

I've been exploring this more with my pinball venture. In my last pinball machine build, I used a PC Startup/Shutdown controller that remotely monitors if the PC is on or off, and based upon you flipping a switch it gracefully starts or shuts down the PC. It mostly works, but I found that sometimes transient voltage spikes in the pinball machine would cause voltage sags and trigger the controller to shut down the PC in the middle of a game, or even start up the machine unattended if the power flickered. I discussed this with a friend who has brought several pinball machines to market, and he said these controllers are nice for development, but are simply not suitable for production. His "home-run" point was that sometimes machine operators will simply flip the power breaker to a whole room of pinball machines (and arcades) at night, and flip it back on in the morning. That would bypass the security of the shutdown controller, so instead you have to make your PC bulletproof.

So I've been looking at solutions again, and primarily wanted something lower cost than Deep Freeze. The general concept is referred to as "rebooting to restore", and "bulletproof", so if you want to google for solutions those are good terms to search. I did find a free solution that works well, Horizon DataSys' Reboot Restore Rx. For free I really can't complain, though I'm not quite sure it lives up to my desires for a pinball machine. The freeware version shows a splashscreen on bootup, which looks like branding on my pinball machine (a paid Pro version has a stealth option). You can only activate/deactivate it from an Admin account, which I guess is okay since you're freezing the PC anyway, but it would be nice to have the PC boot into a streamlined standard user account instead of full-rights Admin. And to my perception it seems to boot slower than Deep Freeze. I've downloaded a trial of Deep Freeze so I can do back to back comparisons of both solutions to decide if Deep Freeze is worth the $50. The paid version of Reboot Restore Rx Pro is also about $50, but I think the only benefit for me would be the stealth boot option.

So if I was trying to freeze a HTPC from updates, I'd certainly be looking at a tool like these. It does take a bit more effort to make sure your data is written to a non-frozen area (Reboot Restore Rx Pro can let you define non-frozen folders in addition to partitions which is nice).

Something else I'm starting to experiment with for my pinball machines is lightweight Windows installs. This past year I kept seeing news reports about Tiny10 and Tiny11, which are massively cut-down versions of Windows that run with very minimal resources. Tiny10/11 seem a bit too extreme for my purposes, but the idea of a Windows install without all the unnecessary bloat, and with better performance (latency is a killer for pinball machines) really drew me in. There seem to be a lot of competing solutions, but most really push the limits and break some functionality. I settled on Ghost Spectre Win10 Superlite, which significantly reduces the bloat without breaking much.

The first thing I noticed after installing Ghost Spectre Win10 Superlite is that they have completely turned off Windows updates. In fact, it is so turned off that you can't even manually get updates. So if you hate MicroSoft forcing updates down your throat, here is a permanent solution. There are also install options that let you choose whether or not to include Windows Defender and the special Superlite SE versioin which has the StartIsBack start menu replacement, so you can have your Win7 style start menu again (and it is AWESOME).

This has all been in the past week, so I've yet to do any real testing with it. I haven't even loaded up my pinball software, nor tried any HTPC software, so for all I know it doesn't work well. But from what I've seen so far, I really like it, and I fully expect it to work.

Anyway, I know that was a long post, but I've never seen any of this discussed on this forum before. It's mostly new to me, perhaps new to you too. If any of you want to explore and talk about this more, it'd probably be good to start a new thread on this forum in the General Discussion area.

[Jamie]

Hi Paul,

I don't know anything on pinball machines or light weight window installations but I will throw this out there. Sorry about your mother by the way. I know that for her use that she probably needs a stripped down windows but for pinball machines have you researched a Linux solution?

[Pauven]

for pinball machines have you researched a Linux solution?

Yes, but I'm currently hampered by my compiler software. Only recently has Embarcadero added support for compiling for Linux, but they hide this feature behind a very expensive paywall (thousands of dollars per year in licensing), and to make it worse this is only for a console, non-GUI app. There is an add-on for compiling to linux GUI, but that too cost hundreds of dollars per year.

So up to this point, I've avoided Linux for financial reasons - ironic I know. A $10 Windows license plus $50 for reboot to restore software is much cheaper at the scale I'm currently operating (typically takes me 1-2 years per machine). If I ever get to scale production, say even 100 machines/yr, then Linux would end up cheaper even with the additional compiler licensing costs.

Another alternative I've considered is compiling for Android, which is included in my compiler at no additional cost. I do need lots of USB IO to connect to all my peripherals (switch inputs, LED outputs, solenoid outputs, DMD output, etc.) and I'm not quite sure how well a phone OS will function in this role, plus there's the challenge of finding hardware that both runs Android and has all the IO I require.

Most of my pinball software code is portable to any platform, so for now running on Windows is just the easiest way for me continue developing functionality. If I ever do reach scale manufacturing, then it should be easy to port over all the functionality, and I just have to worry about adapting the little bit that changes for each platform.

Though any type of scale manufacturing seems highly unlikely. More likely would be if I could sell my software+electronics package as a kit for other manufacturers or even hobbyist use. But even that still seems unlikely.

[Jamie]

for pinball machines have you researched a Linux solution?

Yes, but I'm currently hampered by my compiler software. Only recently has Embarcadero added support for compiling for Linux, but they hide this feature behind a very expensive paywall (thousands of dollars per year in licensing), and to make it worse this is only for a console, non-GUI app. There is an add-on for compiling to linux GUI, but that too cost hundreds of dollars per year.

That totally sucks